Page 7

Maybe I’d just been being a grouchy dick yesterday. Of course, my brothers are as fucking sick of this goddamn mole as I am. They’re just as fucking antsy. How could they not be?

The drive has lured us to the south of Boston, past the last pockets of anything resembling a true neighborhood. Mile after mile, we’re moving through an industrial stretch of space. Warehouses crowd the area, divvied up by chain-link fences. Miron drives us past a trucking depot with a yard full of containers, some of which look to be rusting. The streetlights dim down the road the GPS pin guides us.

Until we’re coming up on a building set back from the road, looking fucking decrepit as shit. It looks like a relic, abandoned by time. Except—the hinges on the gate that opens to the flicker of our headlights are oiled. The gravel that crunches beneath the SUV’s tires looks freshly laid.

Someone’s spent some big fucking money to make this place look inconspicuous. To a naïve onlooker, it would be believable.

There aren’t going to be any naïve onlookers here, though, are there?

Miron parks, his expression dark as stormclouds. “Weapons?” he asks.

“Don’t draw unless I do. Keep it concealed,” I order.

We leave four soldiers in the Range Rover. Two shadow us. It takes me aback, that the men at the door don’t pat us down. It means one of two things: either the security is being handled inside, or whoever has orchestrated this… event… wants their guests to feel comfortable. Unsurprisingly, neither option puts me at ease.

My shoulders are as tense as a wooden plank as we walk down a low-lit, concrete-walled corridor. It spits us out into a space that chills me to the fucking core.

I don’t know how to describe it, except in the most striking details. I’ve seen a fucking lot, but never a space like this. This spherical glass chamber, set inside a larger, more impenetrable structural shell is beyond words. At cursory glance, I can tell the tinted glass partition between the inner and outer areas is bulletproof. The outer area is a series of individual pods. Private enclosures. Each of which is lit by a single source of light. Notably, it isn’t from the ceiling; it’s a lamp, bolted to the wall behind the tufted sofa. The set-up is identical in each pod. There is something simultaneously luxurious and sinister at play.

My stomach turns in revolt.

It’s only when the central platform in the inner orb registers that I realize what I’m fucking looking at: it’s a stage.

I’ve heard of shit like this before.

“Leo.” Miron’s hand grips at my arm.

“I see it.”

“What the fuck? What the fuck is this?”

“You know what it is, Mir.”

His hand drops away from my elbow. I can feel him process it. I don’t have to look at my brother to know he’s working to staunch the same visceral lurch I’ve had to swallow down.

There’s a reason we can’t stomach this. The Yuris do not traffic human beings. We’re no fucking saints, don’t get it twisted. We’ve done just about anything that would make the blood of a good person curdle to sour milk. We have killed, maimed, extorted, smuggled, laundered and intimidated. We’ve brought more than an empire down to its knees. But this? This is a line my papa drew before I was even born. One that Trifon has always reinforced. It is carved into the bedrock of our operation. Devil save whoever brings it up as a potential hike in profit. I remember what Iosif did to the last motherfucker who suggested it to make up for the damage this mole has wrought.

We do not sell people. Yet, right now, I am standing in a room where just that is about to happen. And it is the closest we have been to the mole in months. What the fuck do I do—leave?

No one has to tell me that the chance to do that is fucking gone.

A voice spills out the speakers above us. It’s a woman’s voice, but robotic and unreal. It projects evenly out of some acoustic panels, originating as if from everywhere and nowhere all at once. It welcomes us, “ladies and gentlemen.” Outlines the rules of engagement: bidding is to be conducted via the keypad in each pod; all transactions are anonymous and shall be settled through an encrypted wire transfer of funds within twenty-four hours; buyers will assume full liability of purchase upon acquisition; no lot may be inspected prior to the sale; all sales are final and non-negotiable. It reminds us, with all the cool courtesy of an airline safety briefing, that photography and recording devices are prohibited. Any breach of anonymity and protocol will be met with “immediate and permanent consequences.”

As if some higher power I don’t believe in heard, my phone buzzes in my pocket. I’m careful not to lift it, answering it from beside my thigh.

It’s another text message.

From a different number, this time.

This text is different, too. There are no words. There’s only a photo. A photo, more specifically, of what has to be the most unequivocally stunning woman I’ve ever laid eyes on. Deep, dark brown skin and a shock of icy eyes. Hair that frames her mythic face and spills in chocolate silk down her shoulders and chest. A tantalizingly full mouth. A distinct, and artful mole on the inner-side of her left cheek.

Fuck.

For a flinching moment, this creepy room, the fucked-up pods, the repulsive theater of this circus, it all recedes. There is only her. A woman with an overt intelligence in her otherworldly eyes. Even captured in a still frame, there’s a hyperawareness to her. Self-possession of such magnitude has no business being mousetrapped by a photograph sent from a burner phone to a criminal in a trafficking den.

Who the fuck are you?

Reality forces its way back from my periphery. The lights in the central void brighten, blazing down on the marble floor until it’s a sea of dying lightning bugs. A door I hadn’t noticed at the far side of the chamber opens. Cloaked figures are led out, one after another.